1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a fiscal printer that prints receipts, for example, and stores and holds fiscal information related to sales transactions in fiscal memory.
2. Description of Related Art
In addition to simply printing text data similarly to common printers, fiscal printers also store and hold transaction information, referred to herein as “fiscal information,” such as the sale and the tax amounts, related to product sales transactions, for example. Fiscal printers are commonly used as cash register printers in point-of-sales (POS) systems, for example. The fiscal information to be stored is generally defined by the laws of the country or locale, and is stored in a storage unit called a “fiscal memory.” Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-H05-120567 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-H08-161644 disclose cash registers having a fiscal memory for storing and holding fiscal information. Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-2008-276593 discloses a fiscal printer that has fiscal memory.
Because the fiscal information may be used as data for tax audits, the fiscal information is stored in fiscal memory that is typically a nonvolatile memory sealed in a tamperproof plastic casing so that the information cannot be accessed and changed externally. U.S. Pat. No. 7,523,320 discloses a fiscal data recorder with a protection circuit and tamper-proof seal. The fiscal memory is attached to a fiscal control circuit board, which is separate from the printer control circuit board, and the fiscal control circuit board is removably mounted in the printer so that the circuit board can be installed and removed as needed. A worker having the appropriate authority can remove the fiscal control circuit board from the fiscal printer and can read the stored data from the fiscal memory.
In addition to being removed from the fiscal printer in order to read data from the fiscal memory, the fiscal control circuit board may also be removed for maintenance, such as when there is a bug in a program installed in ROM attached to the fiscal control circuit board, for example. For security, it is therefore desirable to record and store in such fiscal printers the date and time that the fiscal control circuit board is removed, and to enable confirmation, based on the date and time that the circuit board was removed, whether the fiscal control circuit board was removed by a proper authority or whether the fiscal control circuit board was removed in order to tamper with or illegally read data from the fiscal memory.